Chapter 63 Complacent

I watched as the hound went limp and dropped to the floor after its legs buckled under it. Its eyes had already become dull, indicating that it was already dead.

'There is no point in using life drain on it now is there... It lost most of its power after my first attack and now has less than 10% of its life energy left. If that wasn't enough, I am certain that I will not get anything out of absorbing its soul core since I had already maxed out all the stats that it might give me...' Sighing in annoyance, I still moved towards the corpse and put my hand on it before quickly activating the life drain by lighting up the smaller red rune within the void world.

I had done this because of two reasons. One, I am extremely paranoid and will think about this corpse for the hours to come, asking myself the question "What if it gave me something?"

My second reason was that absorbing life energy not only improved the power of my life drain skill, but also refine my blood energy, making it stronger, and refining the enormous red rune, resulting in a more complicated line of text, despite the fact that the change was too small to see with the naked eye.

Thankfully, my naked eyes were far different from the naked eye of another human who could barely see a few hundred meters away, let alone thousands.

However, while I was moving my consciousness towards the life drain rune to activate it, I saw a light from the corner of my eyes, making me look to both my right end left yet not see anything.

The light continued to shine in the corner of my eye, yet even though for some reason no matter how hard I tried I could not find where the light was coming from.

The light was a light brown in color with a few earthen features. This realization made me widen my eyes as I was reminded of something else.

'The earth element seed!' I thought to myself and tried to retract my consciousness to find where that seed would have been stored.

The moment I tried to pull out, I felt an immense viscosity that made moving into eh void space extremely hard. Even after trying to move for almost a minute straight, I found myself incapable of doing anything. I was stuck and there was nothing I could do about it.

Panic began to overwhelm me for a moment.

'What is the point of being immortal if I can't escape my own mind?!'

I hadn't known it before but it was only now that I realized that I had a sense of invulnerability ever since my second death. Yes, death was bad, painful, and extremely scary to the point where it could create some serious trauma, but I wasn't really dying.

Everything during my death felt almost superficial as if it was never happening. Everything felt like a game to me. A game where I would die and respawn with nothing big occurring other than the temporary psychological torture. Yet it was just that. Temporary.

Death was the opposite of temporary for anyone else, yet to me, it felt like just another thing that happened in life. Like a grieving one would feel after losing someone, or the pain of someone getting a terminal illness for a few months before returning to their top shapes after a few months.

This was the first time that I had begun to feel scared. A time when I actually felt like I could die for real and there would be no way to save me.

What is the point of an indestructible body if someone can just attack the mind?

My panic slowly began to recede after a while, however. I knew that panicking wouldn't do me any good so I closed my eyes and tried to take some imaginary breaths in and out through my consciousness.

After a while, I opened my eyes once again and searched every single bit of the void with my eyes, making sure to not skip over a single thing no matter what it was.

[Congratulations on locating your earth seed]

The notification almost made me fall back, but since I didn't have a body the only thing I felt was a small shock traveling through my body.

Looking around once again I finally felt the suppression and viscosity drop when my eyes fell upon a set of new runes.

Being able to move normally again, I quickly left the void world and looked around with my real body to make sure that I could still do it. After the small fright of not being able to move inside the void world, I felt myself becoming a little paranoid, but after a few minutes of trying to calm myself, down, I went into the void world and looked at the new rune once again.

'It's almost as big as the big red one over there...' I thought to myself while pointing in the direction of the other rune. My eyes quickly froze and looked down after a few seconds of shock, looking at my now clearly visible arms and body.

'If I think about it, the first time I entered this place I also had a body.' I scratched my chin before throwing the concept to the back of my mind since there were things that were much more important for the time being.

Looking at the brown earth rune once again, I narrowed my eyes and looked to both my right and left, just to see 4 different smaller runes attached to the larger one by a brown glowing line that connected them.

After hesitating for a few seconds, I finally stretched out my hand and touched the rune, making me get flung back into reality.

Immediately, I felt that something was different. I was not sure if it was me or the area around me, but I felt oddly more sensitive to everything.

I didn't even have to look at the corpse to know it was there. I could feel its warmth slowly leaving its body and dissipating into the ground. I could feel the blood that was continuously seeping out of the corpse slowly begin to dry up and become a stain on the ground.

I could feel the slight vibrations that my footsteps created, traveling through the rocks and bouncing on several rocks, a corpse, and the tunnels ahead before dissipating beyond salvation.

"Holy crap this is amazing!" I shouted in joy.

"With this, I have the ability to locate any of my enemies without looking at them. Granted, this wouldn't work on any flying enemies as well as any enemies that are faster than the vibrations, but it should do for the mean time. Other than that, I still have 4 spells to try-" The sentence died in my throat as a screen appeared in front of me.

[Trial period for the skill Earth Sense has ended]

[Earth Sense]

[Information: Allows the user to locate anything that touches the ground within a 5-meter radius for 1 minute. Doesn't work on anything that flies or levitates off the ground]

[Cost of activation: 5 mana]

"Bruh... It's fine I guess. I wanted to try out my other skills anyway." I shrugged and looked away. Looking towards the remaining tunnels, I narrowed my eyes and dashed towards the one with the lowest amount of dread.

When I reached the end of the cave, I saw another creature in front of me. This one looked a lot more vicious than the hounds from earlier, or the goblin from the beginning.

[Hobgoblin]

[Information: An evolved version of the goblin, While it does not have the agility of a goblin, it makes up for that with its explosive strength and improved intelligence, allowing them to tame less intelligent beasts such as hounds, wolfs, etc.]

My eyes narrowed while looking at it, but that was it.

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After a few seconds of staring each other down, my eyes darted towards the weapon it was holding.

'Another bat?' I asked myself.

While this bat looked almost identical to the one that the goblin held, there were two fundamental differences between the two.

The bat that the hobgoblin held was much larger while also having red runes burnt into the wood. I could understand the size since a hobgoblin was much bigger than a normal goblin, reaching almost 2 meters tall, but the red runes were something I could not understand.

'I still don't know the fundementals when it comes to runes...' I gritted my teeth and balled my hands into fists, clenching them tightly too.

It was only then that I finally realized my biggest problem. I had become too complacent. While I had the drive to fight against the elves, I was too used to having a peaceful lifestyle. A lifestyle where everything was fine and I could live my remaining days completing easy tasks and creating new hobbies.

Yes, Blanca was useless to a certain extent, but I myself had become a person a lazy person. In the 4 weeks that I stayed in my skull house, I hadn't worked out once. All I did was search for beasts, kill them and scavenge their bones and meat. Everything was easy and so I chose to not move further.

'Sometimes being given everything on a silver platter can be a curse rather than a blessing.' I sighed, happy and relieved that I had caught myself early.

While from a certain point of view it might seem that everything I had gotten to strengthen me was things made to make up for all the sacrifices I had made and all the people I had lost, I knew that the world didn't work like that.

The world would steal everything from you with a single wave of its hand. Everything you knew and loved could disappear with a flutter of its eyelash, and that was just how the world worked.

I had to go through hard times to strengthen my will, hard fights to strengthen my body, and painful losses to remind myself how it felt to lose everything I had.

That day, I had made a decision. A decision that would change the course of fate, and the universe itself within its wake.